Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2015. 246 pages, illus. ISBN-13: 978-0-692-42324-0. DOI: 10.21983/P3.0098.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $22.00 in print: paperbound/5.83 X 8.27 in.

The Funambulist Papers, Volume 2

This book is the second volume of texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011. The editorial line of this second series of twenty-six essays is dedicated to philosophical and political questions about bodies. This choice is informed by Léopold Lambert’s own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Corporeal politics do not exist in a void of objects, buildings and cities; on the contrary, they operate through the continuous material encounters between living and non-living bodies. Several texts proposed in this volume examine various forms of corporeal violence (racism, gender-based violence, etc.). This examination, however, can only exist in the integration of the designed environment’s conditioning of this violence. As Mimi Thi Nguyen argues in the conclusion of this book’s first chapter, “the process of attending to the body — unhooded, unveiled, unclothed — cannot be the solution to racism, because that body is always already an abstraction, an effect of law and its violence.” Although the readers won’t find indications about the disciplinary background of the contributors — the “witty” self-descriptions at the end of the book being preferred to academic resumés — the content of the texts will certainly attest to the broad imaginaries at work throughout this volume. Dialogues between dancers and geographers, between artists and biohackers, between architects and philosophers, and so forth, provide the richness of this volume through difference rather than similarity.

The Funambulist Papers are published by the CTM Documents Initiative imprint, Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School. CTM is a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.

TABLE OF CONTENTS //

Introduction: Corporeal Politics, by Léopold Lambert

Profiling Surfaces, by Mimi Thi Nguyen

Caught in the Cloud: The Biopolitics of Teargas Warefare, by Philippe Theophanidis

Bodies on the Line: Somatic Risk and Psychogeographies in Urban Exploration and Palestinian ‘Infiltration,’ by Hanna Baumann

Palestine Made Flesh, by Sophia Azeb

Corpographies: Making Sense of Modern War, by Derek Gregory

Chamayou’s Manhunts: From Territory to Space? by Stuart Elden

Nazi Architecture as Affective Weapon, by Gastón Gordillo

Bodies at Scene: Architecture as Friction, by Pedro Hernández Martínez

Racialized Geography and the Fear of Ships, by Tings Chak

Urban Space and the Production of Gender in Modern Iran, by Alex Shams

Norm, Measure of All Things, by Sofia Lemos

Patterns of Life: A Very Short History of Schematic Bodies, by Grégoire Chamayou

Bee Workers and the Expanding Edges of Capitalism, by Renisa Mawani

What is the Problem? by Nick Axel

Of Associated Milieus, by Sarah Choukah

~~FJORD~~ AND //DESERT// BODIES~~LEAKING~~ AND //CONTAINED// BODIES by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Dress Becomes Body: Fashioning the Force of Form, by Erin Manning

A Sensing Body, A Networked Mind, by Adrienne Hart

Dream of Flying / Flying Bodies, by Elena Loizidou

The Act of Waiting, by Joanne Pouzenc

Bodies in Sympathy for Just One Night, by Chrysanthi Nigianni

Framing the Weird Body in Contemporary European Cinema, by Ina Karkani

Building Body: Two Brief Treatments on Landing Site Theory, by Alan Prohm

A.V. (Anthropocosmogonic Vastupurushamanism), by Dan Mellamphy

Ghost in the Shell-Game: On the Metic Mode of Existence, Inception and Innocence, by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

Portfolio: Body Weight, by Seher Shah

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The Funambulist Pamphlets and Papers is published as part of the Documents Initiative imprint of the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design, a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.

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